Something Red (5 page)

Molly looked up from where she squatted, her forearms across her powerful thighs. “It was a piece of this robe that we found, and it lying by the trail.” She bent her gaze again to the horrid thing on the litter. “There’s a black shadowy art that’s in this.” Then, lower, “I can taste it.” Everyone crossed himself at this, and Brother Abbot turned away, his hand over his eyes, but Father Thomas paused in his office to regard Molly thoughtfully.

Hob became aware of the spill of freezing air coming through the unglazed window. He felt his way back to his cot and returned with a blanket wrapped like a cloak about his shoulders. He noticed now, beyond the clump of murmuring monks, a closed traveling wagon, wide and long; it stood with chocked wheels against a blank stretch of monastery wall, just beside the doorway of the buttery. The wagon was paneled in rich auburn woods, glinting darkly in the torchlight. Ornate
shutters, finely carved in a pattern of vines, with what seemed to be faces peering from among the leaves, were closed against the cold, save for one that was latched back, displaying a thin translucent pane of horn—to Hob a shocking extravagance—through which candlelight from within cast a wan glow. Lady Svajone and her close attendant physician had chosen to remain in the luxury of their traveling wagon, warmed by oil lamps and candles and body heat, rather than avail themselves of the monks’ comfortable but austere dormitories.

There was a door at the back end, as in Molly’s three wagons. The two blond esquires had risen from richly made sleeping furs, wolf and winter rabbit and pine marten by the look of them, laid out by the wagon’s back wheels. They had been sleeping on guard before their mistress’s door, like bandogs. Now they stood there warily eyeing the monks crowding around the litter, listening to the tone of dismay in a language incomprehensible to them. One unobtrusively held a drawn dagger down at his side, and the other stood with left hand on right elbow and right hand resting, as if by chance, on the hilt of his sword.

The door opened and Doctor Vytautas, swathed in a generous linen night-robe and a sable-lined pelice, came out onto the little back platform. He asked them a question. They shrugged; they pointed; after a moment Vytautas gathered the skirts of his robe in one hand and picked his way down the steps. The clack of his wooden soles on the steps came clearly to Hob; then Vytautas was on the snow, shuffling with short careful steps over to the little torchlit group.

He worked his way to the center of the monks, and the boy saw him start and cross himself as he came upon the litter and what remained of Brother Athanasius on earth. He knelt and examined the bloody wreckage. The torches fluttered a bit as random gusts came down off the mountainside. Shadows danced over the corpse, giving it at one point a semblance of movement that made Hob draw back involuntarily.

Vytautas conferred with Molly and Brother Abbot awhile, then
hurried back to the wagon, his gait unsteady, his palm against his brow. He clattered up the steps and disappeared within, and now Hob could no longer ignore the pain seeping into his bare feet from the icy floor, the chill air fingering the blanket he wore cloakwise.

He leaned out and pulled the shutter to, fumbled the latch pin into place, and felt his way along the wall back to his cot. A moment later he was snuggled in, lifting his feet to trap a fold of blanket under them, ducking his face under the cover to warm himself with his own spent breath, slowly becoming comfortable.

He was too young and too tired to fret about what he had seen. Around him were the thick stone walls of the monastery, outside were the formidable monks of St. Germaine: he was safe enough at this moment, and warm as well. He slept; but he dreamed, and in his dream was a cruel amber eye.

CHAPTER 3

T
HE NEXT MORNING
H
OB
took the opportunity to hear Mass in the monastery chapel. Brother Athanasius had not yet been laid out and it would be a day before a requiem Mass was said for him, but a grim mood seemed to permeate the roughly dressed walls: the calls and responses were muted, the echoes falling away into shadow and silence. The monks stood somberly on the bare stone floor and Hob lingered near the back of the little chapel.

Molly never set foot in a church of her own accord, although she would attend if it seemed unwise to refuse. Hob was unsure why this was. Molly would upon occasion say something that would utterly scandalize him, so uninterested did she seem in the question of her soul’s salvation. She had little piety and less to say about it, although she would speak as a good Christian around such as the monks, and let herself be
known by the Christian nickname Molly, rather than the pagan Maeve. The monks were glad enough of her healing to ignore their own misgivings about her.

Molly made no objection to Hob’s hearing Mass when it was at hand, as now, but he never saw her at Christian prayer when the caravan was by itself. Nemain was much the same. The two had their own secrets. Jack Brown, now, would cross himself at roadside shrines, but had a soldier’s rough indifference to church, except on the high feast days.

After Mass Hob came out into the bailey, glad to see the sun. He went back to the men’s dorter and shook Jack awake, and together they made their way down to the kitchen to beg a little taste of something. They came away with a handful each of salt cod on stale rounds of bread and jacks of barley beer, which they took to the stables. They climbed atop a chest-high partition; this defined a half-room filled with heaped hay across the corridor from the stalled ox. There they sat, eating and drinking in a companionable silence. Hob watched with interest as the monks bustled about, mucking out the stalls and bringing in wooden buckets of icy water for the troughs.

Jack rubbed a hand over his face, trying to wake himself up. The luxuriant hair in curls over the tops of his ears and down his neck, the fine pelt that covered his hands and forearms, his bushy eyebrows, all were still of the darkest brown despite his forty-three years, and there was a dusky shadowy tone beneath his pale skin that turned him brown as bread in summer. Folk in the village where he’d been born and raised called him Jack Brown, Jack the Brown, or Brown Jack, to distinguish him from the village’s other two Jacks: his friend Jack White, with his pale blond mop, and an older man, Jack the Fletcher, who made all the arrows for the archers up at the nearby castle.

When they had finished they took the leather mugs back to the kitchen and returned to the stables, Hob to tend to the ox and Jack to
the mare and the ass. When Hob heard Molly’s voice in the bailey, he put down the bucket of grain he held and went to see.

Grooms were backing brawny dappled-gray draft horses up to Lady Svajone’s carriage, hitching them up in a manner Hob had not seen before, three horses abreast, with high-arched elmwood collars, carved and gaily painted with flowering vines, rising above their withers in a complex arrangement. The horses’ droppings were steaming in the snow. Molly stood nearby, speaking with the foreign doctor, who seemed as agitated as he had been the night before. Nemain leaned against the wall by the kitchen door, wrapped in a warm cloak, biting delicately at a large chunk of toasted bread, still hot from the ovens. She was absorbed in watching the grooms buckle the horses into the harness.

“Be said by me, it’s safer you’d be entirely did you wait till all parties were ready to take the road,” Molly was saying urgently to Doctor Vytautas.

“Alas, she is insist, she is demand that we make the travel. She fears that she will never have the safe, the safety, till we come down from out these mountains. I am urging her to stay here and rest, but she refuse to make consideration of this. We have the guildsmen, the . . . the men who cut the stone?” Molly nodded. “They are to come with us. And we have Gintaras and Azuolas.” He gestured at the esquires, engaged in readying their horses, a pair of fine matched blacks.

The Lietuvans worked with swift efficiency, deftly spreading saddle pads and heaving up saddles, clucking to soothe the restless mounts, tightening cinches. Their saddle pads were yearling bearskins, an accent of barbaric beauty beneath the ornately worked saddles. They threw tasseled reins back over the horses’ heads and, almost in unison, vaulted lithely into the saddles.

The conversation resumed, but in Latin, Vytautas fluent and confident, Molly hesitant. Hob lost interest; he wandered over to Nemain.
She broke off a piece of the bread and gave it to him. “They’re running from it,” she said.

“Did you see that poor monk?” asked Hob.

“I heard somewhat of him,” she said. “Herself is teaching me,” she added obscurely. Hob knew that Molly instructed Nemain in the use of herbs and the cure of animals and people, instruction that Jack and he were not allowed to share. He supposed that Molly had found a lesson in the horrifying assault. The fear and misery of yesterday, held at bay by the new morning, began to seep back into his soul.

One of the grooms was pushing hard at the leftmost horse, one hand against the horse’s breast and the other holding the reins close beneath the bridle. The rows of little bells along the cheekpieces tinkled brightly in the crisp clear air. The horse tossed its head and snorted, breath smoking, and backed awkwardly three or four paces. Another groom began to buckle it into the straps.

Two other wagons, plain and rugged, were already hitched to teams of workaday horses. These were for the handful of Lietuvan grooms and other retainers who traveled with Lady Svajone, evidently a person of some consequence. The masons had hitched an ass loaded with packs of their tools to the second wagon, and climbed up into the wagon bed, heavily robed against the cold.

“The masons are off as well?” said Hob.

“They are indeed.”

“I had not thought they would leave the pilgrims. Herself says both are bound for Durham.”

“I had not thought they would be so hen-hearted,” said Nemain severely.

She seemed to have recovered from her own fears, even to have forgotten them. Hob found her bewildering these days; found her not quite the little girl he had played with last summer. In the last few months it
had seemed to him that she was at times more easily troubled than he. She was more wary and alert. But then he would sense by her silences, her flushed keen glances, that something within her spirit was growing, bright as the ice rivers that ran down Old Catherine’s gray sides. Sometimes he worried that it might also become as hard, or as cold. Hob, with his scanty experience, found her difficult to judge, as he found everyone difficult to judge. He had been the lost child, the boy in the priest house, playing with the village children yet not himself a child of the village, and then this: away on the endless road, with formidable Molly and her silent man and her fey grandchild.

There was a bustle. The two esquires trotted their mounts up and took station ahead of the gray team. Brother Abbot came forward to take his leave. Doctor Vytautas pressed a small leather bag into Brother’s hand, enfolding it in both of his. Whistles sounded, a driver climbed to the seat of Lady Svajone’s wagon, and Doctor Vytautas scurried to the rear of the wagon and skipped lightly up to the door. In a moment he had vanished within, and Brother Abbot gave sign to Brother Porter to open the great gates.

The procedure of the day before was reversed, the doors swinging open to reveal that the portcullis had already been drawn across the exterior gap. The monks of the day watch and the monks of Lady Svajone’s escort over the crest of the Thonarberg—doubled since last night’s discovery—trotted out together, to fill the exterior forecourt.

Hob and Nemain drew back a bit, for the grays were eager to go and dancing a bit in the traces. The driver braced a leather sole against the brake until the doors were open wide. Then he kicked it loose. The two esquires were already through the gate. Lady Svajone’s wagon began to move slowly after them, toward the still-closed portcullis. The wagon’s rowan-wood wheels had iron rims with little blunt spikes worked into the iron, so that they bit into snow and ice and mud. The
gates swung closed behind the third wagon, the capstan monks gave a collective grunt as they strained against the bars, and a moment later Hob heard the squeal of the portcullis being retracted.

On the other side of the wall the drivers could be heard clicking their tongues and whistling to their animals; calls of farewell rang out crisply in the frosty air from the little train and from the monks who remained behind; the rumble of the wheels echoed from the mountainside. After a moment the portcullis squealed again. The postern opened and the monks of the day watch filed back in.

Molly came to Hob. “We’ll be away ourselves on the morrow or surely the day next. See that you’ve stowed— Look at this face.” She took him under the chin and began wiping his cheek with a fold of her skirt. “Must you be putting your whole face into the porridge? And what’s this smutch up here?”

Hob screwed up his eyes as she scrubbed vigorously at his forehead, clucking and muttering. Finally she released him, with a little pat of approval.

“See that you’ve stowed and tied fast everything that’s loose. There’ll be a mort of haste upon us from the moment we’re out the gate till we come off the mountain, and there’ll be no stopping on the road to shift what’s come undone. We’ll not be playing for the good brothers, so you can leave the instruments in their wrappings. Then you’re to help Jack look over the harness and the wheels and the like.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“There’s my lad.”

In the event, they stayed two full days after that. Molly was kept busy tending to the monks and dispensing salves and ointments, and the others were glad of the rest. It was while Hob and Jack Brown were in the stables again, with Jack showing him how to mend a frayed leather trace, that they heard a string of Saxon oaths delivered with a strong Norman accent, a little way down the row of stalls. Jack and Hob wandered
down to find one of the men-at-arms from the refectory, brush in hand, standing outside a stall and wishing hellfire upon the horse within. This was a tall mare with a large and ugly head, her ears laid flat and her lips drawn apart. As Hob came up, she darted at the soldier, lunging forward to the limit of her tether, her big yellow teeth snapping shut on the air with a loud click.